[00:00.00] As the pace of life in today's world grows ever faster, we seem forever on the go.
[00:07.65]With so much to do and so little time to do it in,how are we to cope?
[00:14.94]Richard Tomkins sets about utangling the problem and comes up with an answer.
[00:22.73]OLD FATHER TIME BECOMES A TERROR by Richard Tomkins
[00:29.26]Once upon a time,technology,we thought, would make our lives easier.Machines were expected to do our work for us
[00:38.92]leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure.
[00:46.55]But instead of liberating us,technology has enslaved us.Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate
[00:56.37]as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium.And as each invention arrives,it eats further into our time
[01:08.00]The motorcar,for example,promised unimaginable levels of personal mobitlity.But now
[01:16.49]traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage
[01:21.92]and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams.
[01:26.94]The aircraft promised new horizons,too.The trouble is,it delivered them.Its very existence
[01:36.73]created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking
[01:44.88]the transatlantic shopping expedition,for example,or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world
[01:53.11]In most cases,technology has not saved time,but enabled us to do more things.In the home
[02:02.51]washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry.In reality
[02:10.56]they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly,creating seven times as much washing and ironing
[02:19.39]Similarly,the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower,multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming
[02:28.98]Meanwhile,technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time-the laptop-on-the beach
[02:38.20]synfrome-but added the new burden of dealing with faxes,e-mails and voicemails
[02:45.33]It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers
[02:53.69]or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet
[02:58.49]Technology apart,the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed:the information explosion
[03:08.73]A couple of centuries ago,nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers
[03:18.37]Today,those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day
[03:27.93]News,facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world.The television set offers 150channels
[03:38.51]There are millions of Internet sites.Magazines,books and CD-ROMs proliferate
[03:46.56]In the whole world of scholarship,there were only a handful of scientific journal in the 18th century
[03:54.61]and the publication of a book was an event,says Edward Wilson,honorary curator in entomology
[04:03.59]at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology.Now,I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals
[04:13.44]or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship
[04:23.42]There is another reason for our increased time stress levels,too:
[04:28.33]rising prosperity.As ever-larger quantities of goods and services
[04:35.28]are produced,they have to be consumed.Driven on by advertising,we do our best to oblige:we buy more
[04:46.22]travel more and play more,but we struggle to keep up
[04:52.10]So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance-the confusion of endless choice
[05:01.37]Of course,not everyone is overstressed.It's a convenient short-hand to say we're all time-starved
[05:10.05]but we have to remember that it only applies to,say,half the population
[05:17.02]says Michael Willmott,director of the Future Founkdation,a London research company
[05:24.08]You've got people retiring early,you've got the unemployed,you've got other people
[05:31.31]may be only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all.If you're unemployed
[05:40.24]your problem is that you've got too much time,not too little.
[05:45.99]Paul Edwards,chairman of the London-based Henley Centre fore-casting group,points out
[05:53.36]that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated,or self-imposed.Everyone talks about it so much
[06:03.00]that about 50 percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done
[06:11.80]he says.It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy.If you're not stressted,you're not succeeding
[06:21.54]Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person
[06:28.31]There is another aspect to all of this tooHour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that
[06:38.63]in the U.K,working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years,and in theU.S.,they have actually fallen
[06:48.37]even for those in professional and executive jobs,where the perceptions of stress are highest
[06:56.44]In the U.S.,John Robinson,professor of sociology at the University of Maryland,and Geoffrey Godbey
[07:06.19]professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that,since the mid-1960s
[07:13.08]the average American had gained five hours a week in
[07:18.05]free time-that is time left after working,sleeping,commuting,caring for children and doing the chores
[07:27.03]The gains,however,were unevenly distributed.The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters
[07:36.57]Those who gained the least-less than an hour-were working couples with pre-school children
[07:43.91]perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their off-spring
[07:50.23]There is,of course, a gender is issue here,too
[07:54.96]Advances in household appliances may hae encouraged women to take paying jobs:but as we have already noted
[08:04.10]techonlogy did not end household chores.As a result,
[08:09.72]we see appalling inequalites in the distribution of free time between the sexes
[08:16.48]According to the Henley Center,working fathers in the UK average48hours of free time a week.Working mothers get14
[08:28.13]Inequalities apart,the perception of the time famine is widespread,and has provoked a variety of reactions
[08:37.41]One is an attempt to gain the largest possible amount of satisfaction from the smallest possible investment of time
[08:46.45]People today want fast food,sound bytes and instant gratification.And they become upset when time is wasted
[08:56.58]People talk about quality time.They want perfect moments ,says the Henley Centre's Edwards
[09:04.29]If you take your kids to a movie and McDonald's and it's not perfect,you've wasted an afternoon,and it's a sense
[09:12.33]that you've lost something precious.If you lose some money you can earn some more
[09:19.67]but if you waste time you can never get it back.
[09:24.17]People are also trying to buy time.Anything that helps streamline our lives is a grown market
[09:32.55]One example is what Americans call concierge services-domestic help,childcare,gardening and decorating
[09:42.27]And on-line retailer are seeing big increases in sales-though not,as yet,profits
[09:49.82]A third reaction to time famine has been the growth of the work-life debate.You hear more about people
[09:58.62]taking early retirement or giving up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations with shorter working hours
[10:07.69]And bodies such as Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up
[10:13.62]urging employers to end the long-hours culture among managers and to adopt family-friendly working policies
[10:23.20]The trouble with all these reactions is that liberating time-whether by making better use of it,buying it form others
[10:32.97]or reducing the amount spent at work-is futile if the hours gained are immediately diverted to other purposes
[10:42.38]As Godbey points out,the stress we feel arises no from a shortage of time,
[10:48.39]but from the surfeit of things we try to cram into it
[10:53.87]It's the kid in the candy store,"he says. "There's just so many good things to do.The array of choices is stunning
[11:03.80]Our free time is increasing,but not as fast as our sense of the necessary.
[11:10.56]A more successful remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather than evading it.
[11:17.83]Before the industrial revolution,peole lived in small communities with limited communications
[11:25.66]Within the confines of their village,they could reasonably expect to know everything that was to be known
[11:34.15]see everything that was to be seen,and do everything that was to be done
[11:41.75]Today,being curious by nature,we are still trying to do the same
[11:48.60]But the golbal village is a world of limitless possibilities,and we can never achieve our aim.
[11:56.25]It is not more time we need:it is fewer desires.
[12:01.48]We need to switch off the cell-phone and leave the children to play by themselves
[12:08.58]We need to buy less,read less and travel less.
[12:13.28]We need to set boundaries for ourselves,or be doomed to mounting despair
[12:20.73]on the go cope set about untangle
[12:26.88]繁忙 妥善处理 开始 理顺
[12:33.03]quantities/a large quantity of idleness enslave bewildering
[12:41.27]许多的 闲散 奴役 费解的
[12:49.51]millennium eat into motorcar aircraft
[12:55.12]一千年 侵蚀 汽车 飞机
[13:00.72]time-consuming transatlantic expedition convention
[13:07.43]耗费时间的 横越大西洋的 探险 惯例
[13:14.15]toil in reality multiply groom
[13:19.71]辛苦地劳作 事实上 增加 梳妆
[13:25.28]laptop syndrome burden fax
[13:31.77]便携式电脑 综合症状 负担 传真件
[13:38.26]voicemail software glitch fraction
[13:43.69]语音邮件 软件 失灵 少许
[13:49.13]pour in CD-ROM proliferate a handful of
[13:55.70]大量涌入 光盘只读存储器 激增 少量
[14:02.27]journal publication honorary curator
[14:08.26]日报 出版 荣誉的 馆长
[14:14.26]entomology comparative zoology amount to
[14:20.60]昆虫学 比较的 动物学 相当于
[14:26.95]minute frontier stress prosperity
[14:33.85]极少的 知识边缘 压力 繁荣
[14:40.74]oblige discontent abundance confusion
[14:46.87]效劳 不满足 丰富 迷乱
[14:53.00]shorthand unemployed peripherally economy
[14:58.76]速记 失业的 边缘地 经济
[15:04.52]forecast self-imposed volunteer perception
[15:11.22]预测 自己强加的 自愿者 观念
[15:17.92]sociology unevenly singles empty-nester
[15:24.07]社会学 不平坦地 未婚的人 厮守空巢者
[15:30.22]pre-school nurture offspring gender
[15:35.91]学前的 养育 孩子 性别
[15:41.61]appliance appalling distribution famine
[15:47.71]器具 骇人听闻的 分布 饥荒
[15:53.81]widespread provoke a variety of byte
[16:00.16]遍布的 使产生 各种的 字节
[16:06.50]gratification streamline growth concierge
[16:12.21]满意 使合理化 生长 看门人
[16:17.92]domestic childcare on-line retailer
[16:23.37]家庭的 儿童照管 在线的 零售商
[16:28.81]forum spring up futile divert
[16:34.60]论坛 突然出现 无效的 转移
[16:40.39]arise shortage surfeit cram
[16:44.84]出现 缺少 过量 硬塞进
[16:49.29]candy evade confine reasonably
[16:54.90]糖果 躲开 范围 合理地
[17:05.75]切断 手机 注定
[00:07.65]With so much to do and so little time to do it in,how are we to cope?
[00:14.94]Richard Tomkins sets about utangling the problem and comes up with an answer.
[00:22.73]OLD FATHER TIME BECOMES A TERROR by Richard Tomkins
[00:29.26]Once upon a time,technology,we thought, would make our lives easier.Machines were expected to do our work for us
[00:38.92]leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure.
[00:46.55]But instead of liberating us,technology has enslaved us.Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate
[00:56.37]as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium.And as each invention arrives,it eats further into our time
[01:08.00]The motorcar,for example,promised unimaginable levels of personal mobitlity.But now
[01:16.49]traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage
[01:21.92]and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams.
[01:26.94]The aircraft promised new horizons,too.The trouble is,it delivered them.Its very existence
[01:36.73]created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking
[01:44.88]the transatlantic shopping expedition,for example,or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world
[01:53.11]In most cases,technology has not saved time,but enabled us to do more things.In the home
[02:02.51]washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry.In reality
[02:10.56]they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly,creating seven times as much washing and ironing
[02:19.39]Similarly,the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower,multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming
[02:28.98]Meanwhile,technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time-the laptop-on-the beach
[02:38.20]synfrome-but added the new burden of dealing with faxes,e-mails and voicemails
[02:45.33]It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers
[02:53.69]or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet
[02:58.49]Technology apart,the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed:the information explosion
[03:08.73]A couple of centuries ago,nearly all the world's accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers
[03:18.37]Today,those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day
[03:27.93]News,facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world.The television set offers 150channels
[03:38.51]There are millions of Internet sites.Magazines,books and CD-ROMs proliferate
[03:46.56]In the whole world of scholarship,there were only a handful of scientific journal in the 18th century
[03:54.61]and the publication of a book was an event,says Edward Wilson,honorary curator in entomology
[04:03.59]at Harvard University's museum of comparative zoology.Now,I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals
[04:13.44]or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship
[04:23.42]There is another reason for our increased time stress levels,too:
[04:28.33]rising prosperity.As ever-larger quantities of goods and services
[04:35.28]are produced,they have to be consumed.Driven on by advertising,we do our best to oblige:we buy more
[04:46.22]travel more and play more,but we struggle to keep up
[04:52.10]So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance-the confusion of endless choice
[05:01.37]Of course,not everyone is overstressed.It's a convenient short-hand to say we're all time-starved
[05:10.05]but we have to remember that it only applies to,say,half the population
[05:17.02]says Michael Willmott,director of the Future Founkdation,a London research company
[05:24.08]You've got people retiring early,you've got the unemployed,you've got other people
[05:31.31]may be only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all.If you're unemployed
[05:40.24]your problem is that you've got too much time,not too little.
[05:45.99]Paul Edwards,chairman of the London-based Henley Centre fore-casting group,points out
[05:53.36]that the feeling of pressures can also be exaggerated,or self-imposed.Everyone talks about it so much
[06:03.00]that about 50 percent of unemployed or retired people will tell you they never have enough time to get things done
[06:11.80]he says.It's almost got to the point where there's stress envy.If you're not stressted,you're not succeeding
[06:21.54]Everyone wants to have a little bit of this stress to show they're an important person
[06:28.31]There is another aspect to all of this tooHour-by-hour logs kept by thousands of volunteers over the decades have shown that
[06:38.63]in the U.K,working hours have risen only slightly in the last 10 years,and in theU.S.,they have actually fallen
[06:48.37]even for those in professional and executive jobs,where the perceptions of stress are highest
[06:56.44]In the U.S.,John Robinson,professor of sociology at the University of Maryland,and Geoffrey Godbey
[07:06.19]professor of leisure studies at Penn State University found that,since the mid-1960s
[07:13.08]the average American had gained five hours a week in
[07:18.05]free time-that is time left after working,sleeping,commuting,caring for children and doing the chores
[07:27.03]The gains,however,were unevenly distributed.The people who benefited the most were singles and empty-nesters
[07:36.57]Those who gained the least-less than an hour-were working couples with pre-school children
[07:43.91]perhaps reflecting the trend for parents to spend more time nurturing their off-spring
[07:50.23]There is,of course, a gender is issue here,too
[07:54.96]Advances in household appliances may hae encouraged women to take paying jobs:but as we have already noted
[08:04.10]techonlogy did not end household chores.As a result,
[08:09.72]we see appalling inequalites in the distribution of free time between the sexes
[08:16.48]According to the Henley Center,working fathers in the UK average48hours of free time a week.Working mothers get14
[08:28.13]Inequalities apart,the perception of the time famine is widespread,and has provoked a variety of reactions
[08:37.41]One is an attempt to gain the largest possible amount of satisfaction from the smallest possible investment of time
[08:46.45]People today want fast food,sound bytes and instant gratification.And they become upset when time is wasted
[08:56.58]People talk about quality time.They want perfect moments ,says the Henley Centre's Edwards
[09:04.29]If you take your kids to a movie and McDonald's and it's not perfect,you've wasted an afternoon,and it's a sense
[09:12.33]that you've lost something precious.If you lose some money you can earn some more
[09:19.67]but if you waste time you can never get it back.
[09:24.17]People are also trying to buy time.Anything that helps streamline our lives is a grown market
[09:32.55]One example is what Americans call concierge services-domestic help,childcare,gardening and decorating
[09:42.27]And on-line retailer are seeing big increases in sales-though not,as yet,profits
[09:49.82]A third reaction to time famine has been the growth of the work-life debate.You hear more about people
[09:58.62]taking early retirement or giving up high pressure jobs in favour of occupations with shorter working hours
[10:07.69]And bodies such as Britain's National Work-Life Forum have sprung up
[10:13.62]urging employers to end the long-hours culture among managers and to adopt family-friendly working policies
[10:23.20]The trouble with all these reactions is that liberating time-whether by making better use of it,buying it form others
[10:32.97]or reducing the amount spent at work-is futile if the hours gained are immediately diverted to other purposes
[10:42.38]As Godbey points out,the stress we feel arises no from a shortage of time,
[10:48.39]but from the surfeit of things we try to cram into it
[10:53.87]It's the kid in the candy store,"he says. "There's just so many good things to do.The array of choices is stunning
[11:03.80]Our free time is increasing,but not as fast as our sense of the necessary.
[11:10.56]A more successful remedy may lie in understanding the problem rather than evading it.
[11:17.83]Before the industrial revolution,peole lived in small communities with limited communications
[11:25.66]Within the confines of their village,they could reasonably expect to know everything that was to be known
[11:34.15]see everything that was to be seen,and do everything that was to be done
[11:41.75]Today,being curious by nature,we are still trying to do the same
[11:48.60]But the golbal village is a world of limitless possibilities,and we can never achieve our aim.
[11:56.25]It is not more time we need:it is fewer desires.
[12:01.48]We need to switch off the cell-phone and leave the children to play by themselves
[12:08.58]We need to buy less,read less and travel less.
[12:13.28]We need to set boundaries for ourselves,or be doomed to mounting despair
[12:20.73]on the go cope set about untangle
[12:26.88]繁忙 妥善处理 开始 理顺
[12:33.03]quantities/a large quantity of idleness enslave bewildering
[12:41.27]许多的 闲散 奴役 费解的
[12:49.51]millennium eat into motorcar aircraft
[12:55.12]一千年 侵蚀 汽车 飞机
[13:00.72]time-consuming transatlantic expedition convention
[13:07.43]耗费时间的 横越大西洋的 探险 惯例
[13:14.15]toil in reality multiply groom
[13:19.71]辛苦地劳作 事实上 增加 梳妆
[13:25.28]laptop syndrome burden fax
[13:31.77]便携式电脑 综合症状 负担 传真件
[13:38.26]voicemail software glitch fraction
[13:43.69]语音邮件 软件 失灵 少许
[13:49.13]pour in CD-ROM proliferate a handful of
[13:55.70]大量涌入 光盘只读存储器 激增 少量
[14:02.27]journal publication honorary curator
[14:08.26]日报 出版 荣誉的 馆长
[14:14.26]entomology comparative zoology amount to
[14:20.60]昆虫学 比较的 动物学 相当于
[14:26.95]minute frontier stress prosperity
[14:33.85]极少的 知识边缘 压力 繁荣
[14:40.74]oblige discontent abundance confusion
[14:46.87]效劳 不满足 丰富 迷乱
[14:53.00]shorthand unemployed peripherally economy
[14:58.76]速记 失业的 边缘地 经济
[15:04.52]forecast self-imposed volunteer perception
[15:11.22]预测 自己强加的 自愿者 观念
[15:17.92]sociology unevenly singles empty-nester
[15:24.07]社会学 不平坦地 未婚的人 厮守空巢者
[15:30.22]pre-school nurture offspring gender
[15:35.91]学前的 养育 孩子 性别
[15:41.61]appliance appalling distribution famine
[15:47.71]器具 骇人听闻的 分布 饥荒
[15:53.81]widespread provoke a variety of byte
[16:00.16]遍布的 使产生 各种的 字节
[16:06.50]gratification streamline growth concierge
[16:12.21]满意 使合理化 生长 看门人
[16:17.92]domestic childcare on-line retailer
[16:23.37]家庭的 儿童照管 在线的 零售商
[16:28.81]forum spring up futile divert
[16:34.60]论坛 突然出现 无效的 转移
[16:40.39]arise shortage surfeit cram
[16:44.84]出现 缺少 过量 硬塞进
[16:49.29]candy evade confine reasonably
[16:54.90]糖果 躲开 范围 合理地
[17:05.75]切断 手机 注定
